25 Ways to Use Twitter for Growth Hacking

If you’ve been using Twitter to market your business, you already know that Twitter can help to give your website traffic a boost. However, if you are serious about taking your Twitter marketing to the next level, you need to use Twitter for growth hacking. Growth hacking and traffic generation are not one and the same. A lot of people confuse growth hacking with other online marketing strategies. It isn’t. Growth hacking is a principle that prioritises sustainable growth above all other success metrics.

Properly implemented, growth hacking is all about using traffic generation techniques to complement and build on previous traffic generation campaigns and set the tone and direction for future traffic. Instead of simply drumming up fresh traffic every single day, growth hacking enables you to lay foundations for ever increasing levels of sustainable traffic in the future. You’re not just treading water. You’re not just chasing your tail. Instead, you have a systematic progression of traffic value that enables optimal online brand building.

Twitter can be instrumental in a high-value growth hacking campaign. Here are just 25 ways you can use Twitter for growth hacking:

#1 Set Up a Website Specific Twitter Account

This may seem basic, but a lot of online publishers actually use a generic Twitter account to promote their complete online portfolio. This is a mistake. When you do this, you’re sending conflicting signals to your target audience members. All your blogs might be in the same niche, but believe me, you actually have different audiences. Why? Each of your blogs has their own specific spin on a particular niche. This spin naturally attracts people who are interested in that particular perspective.

Even if you only have one blog for your business, perhaps you also need to handle support? Keeping support and your content marketing efforts separate is a great idea and it’s why around 30% of brands have a dedicated support account including the likes of Nike (@NikeSupport), UPS (@UPSHelp) and American Express (@AskAmex).

#2 Use Twitter Search to Determine Niche Content Demand

By simply entering your most prominent target keywords on Twitter, you would be able to see the content shared by your competitors or “near” competitors. Certain patterns should arise fairly quickly. You can see that there seems to be common themes and frequently discussed topics that get the most likes and retweets.

Pay attention to this. There’s a reason for this. You have to remember that your website exists to serve the needs of your audience, not the other way around. You have to produce content that would create a high level of engagement. It’s impossible to do that if you take a wild guess at the content topics that you think your audience members would appreciate.

The good news is that it’s fairly easy to use twitter to determine social demand. Just pay attention to the number of likes and retweets topical content in your niche get. One of the easiest ways to go about this is to type your niche keyword into Twitter along with “min_retweets:5”. You can obviously change the number to a higher or lower value. If our niche was social media marketing then we may enter #SMM and our results are as follows:

Again, this may seem pretty straightforward, but when people interact with your engagement content on Twitter, they must be able to easily access your website. By “engagement content,” I’m talking about content you post on Twitter that is not linked to your blog. Instead, its content, in the form of questions, suggestions, comments and data, seek to establish your brand as an authority in your niche.

It would a waste to pump out that high-quality content and fail to give readers a way to access your website. While your main goal is not necessarily to drum up traffic from your tweets, you should make it easy for people to get to your website. Your main goal should be to build a solid, credible brand on twitter.

#4: Keep Visitors on Your Website Longer By IncludingAutomated Tweets at the End of Your Content

It’s important to try to increase dwell time. The longer visitors remain on your website, the higher the chance that they will click on links, ads and otherwise engage in behaviour that could lead to a conversion. Also, when people stay on your website longer, they get a much better appreciation of the overall value your online property brings to the table.

To maximise “dwell time,” embed the tweets that you have posted in the past at the bottom of the content. If anything, the credibility building content that you have posted in the past should let the reader know that they are on a website that is extremely dedicated to a specific niche of information.

If you look at your traffic stats, you’re going to see a lot of people bouncing out after a page or two. It happens to everybody. But now look at the people who spend a lot of time reading through your content. These are the people that you need to evangelise for you.

How do you do that? You now know that there are people who are engaged with your content, almost invested in it. Leverage this by locking certain high-valued interior pages. These visitors must share the URL of that high-value content on their Facebook wall or Twitter feed for them to see the internal page.

You’d be surprised as to how much targeted traffic you can drive to yourwebsite using this technique. Why? Only extremely interested people would do this. However, on social media, they tend to also attract other people who have the same interests.

#6: Get More Clicks Per Visitor By Embedding Relevant Tweets in Your Content

If you are looking to maximize the amount of clicks you get per visitor, you might want to consider embedding highly specific tweets at strategic parts of your content. There are several WordPress plugins out there that will allow you to do this, including “Click to Tweet”, all available for free. The best way to do this is to embed a short snippet/fact from your blog post into a tweet.

#7: Tweet Your Content and Hitchhike On Popular Hashtags

Now, you probably have heard this advice before. Twitter uses hashtags to categorise your tweets – Not mind blowing out of the box stuff telling you this, I know. You can maximise the exposure of your content by including related hashtags. It’s important to make sure that the hashtags are relevant.

But something a lot of people get completely wrong is using irrelevant or untargeted hashtags that are either too vague or completely unrelated to the content you’re sharing leading to a few, uninterested clicks from Twitter users.

You need to be very selective as far as the hashtags you are using. So how do you get the right hashtags? Very simple. Look at your competitor’s content. Pay attention to the hashtags they are using and try to find more specialised hashtags for your own content.

There are several tools out there, both paid and free, which can help you find more targeted and relevant hashtags to your content. We’re huge fans of Hashtagify both for its simplicity and the hashtags it can help you to find and ultimately use so would recommend there as a starting point.

#8: Retweet Positive Feedback Tweets You Receive

Whether you have a blog, an e-commerce website or a services business, this piece of advice applies across the board. Seriously. There’s no better form of social proof than a long list of positive tweets from Twitter. You need to cherry pick your most positive feedback and then retweet these on your website’s Twitter account. But don’t stop there, you can also embed these on your website to get people to see for themselves the unsolicited positive feedback your content, service or products are getting.

Let’s face it, you can say to somebody that you have a superior product until you’re blue in the face. However, they will only be truly interested if they see other people that they don’t know, singing your praises. As long as it’s not obvious that those other testimonials are fake, or were paid off, people do tend to put a lot of weight on social proof.

On your website’s official Twitter account, tweet third party content. Now, a lot of marketers would say that this is a traffic leak. A lot of them would even argue that it’s a complete and total waste of time. I beg to disagree.

The main goal of your Twitter account is to build credibility and authority with your target audience members on Twitter. Just because you post an awesome piece of content doesn’t automatically mean that your target audience members will jump all over it. In most cases, they wouldn’t even notice it. Why? You haven’t established your credibility. You haven’t established a track record of posting only the most important and niche specific content on your Twitter feed.

By creating a track record of retweeting high quality content from third parties, you increase your overall authority. People can see, just by looking at your Twitter feed, that you are a specialist when it comes to certain types of content information. On top of this, the more you retweet high quality content from many different sources, the higher the chance they would follow you on Twitter. This is a big deal because when the time comes for you to publish your own high value content, these other publishers might retweet your post. They would then drive some of their followers to your website.

You need to both curate content and then share the links and also retweet other brand and influencer’s tweets. Sujan Patel, someone I’m sure you’ve heard of, does this to perfection by curating a range of content and either mentioning the author of the content to kill two birds with one stone:

#10: Embed a Twitter Appreciation Page

When somebody goes to your site, it’s a good idea for them to see the number of mentions that your website gets on Twitter. Again, this is a form of social proof. Now, unlike retweeting good feedback and pasting it on a prominent place on your site, you should have a simple presentation of all the mentions of your brand on Twitter. While this tip’s overall impact is not as powerful as tip #8 above, it still has a positive effect. Again, you are trying to leverage the power of social proof.

#11: Tweet Multiple Content Updates at Regular Times in a Day

The big challenge with Twitter is that, in many cases, a large chunk of your target audience members are not on Twitter at a certain time. You are simply out of luck when you send out your tweet at around the time most of your audience members are in bed. To ensure that your tweet gets in front of the right eyeballs at the right time, regularly tweet your content updates several times during a 24-hour period.

The king of tweeting constantly throughout the day is Jeff Bullas. He’ll tweet with some of the smallest intervals I’ve ever seen and he knows what he’s doing. So whenever someone tells you to tweet a maximum of 3, 4 or 5 times a day, just send them to Jeff Bullas’ Twitter feed.

Also, you should set up your automated social media management system to republish previous tweets later on in the week. This way, you increase your chances of getting your content in front of the right eyeballs at the right time. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Buffer is essential for this! They make it so easy to do with a clean interface and it’s why I’ve been using them for years now.

#12: Tweet Screenshots of Positive Feedback From Influential People in Your Niche

While a testimonial can go a long way, a testimonial from a known authority in your niche can take your brand to a much higher level. We’re talking social proof on steroids here. This is why it’s really important to actively police your Twitter feed to filter positive feedback from highly influential people in your niche. These people’s recommendations go a long way. Not only should you retweet them, but you should also take their screenshot and put them on a prominent place on your website.

But don’t limit yourself to what people say on Twitter. Instead, look for mentions in online publications, take a screenshot and share it on Twitter with a link to the post and an @mention of the author, naturally.

#13: Conduct a Social Poll on Twitter to Brainstorm Traffic Generation Ideas

Sometimes, it pays off tremendously to be up front. Ask your target audience members directly that you’d like to spread the word about your brand. Ask for their help.

The key here is to crowd-source traffic generation ideas from your target audience members. Why do this?Well, they’re in the best position to know where other people interested in your niche hang out online.

#14: Look for Guest Bloggers on Twitter

Using Twitter, look for niche bloggers looking for backlinks from highly targeted websites. Usually, it’s the other way around. These bloggers will be on the hunt for you because they’re looking for links. If you operate a fast rising or an established authority website or blog, these people would eagerly partner with you.

When you take the first initiative to solicit guest posts, you have a tremendous bargaining advantage. You can set clear parameters as to the type of content that you’re looking for. You can even dictate terms for their guest post. For example, you can require them to tweet about their guest post extensively. There are so many ways you can play this, and the best part is you’re in the driver’s seat.

#15: Follow All the Relevant People in Your Niche and Engage Them

Now, don’t get me wrong, one of the oldest Twitter “promotion tips” in existence is to follow a ton of people so that a certain amount of them will follow you back. Once you have enough of a following, you then blast them with spam. As you can probably already tell, this technique is not that effective. It’s important to follow only relevant people. The key here is not to obsess about them following you back. That’s not really the issue. Your main goal should be to follow the influence leaders in your niche so you know what they’re talking about. You would have your finger on the post of what’s going on in your niche.

This is a tremendous competitive advantage because you would know the hot trends in your niche and write compelling content. Also, you would be able to engage them using your expertise. If you do this well enough, it can lead to all sorts of opportunities like guest posting, interviews, specialized partnerships, you name it.

#16: Tweet Snippets of Your Past Posts in the Form of Questions

A lot of people search Twitter in the form of questions. Also, using a question based tweeting strategy enables you to take advantage of search engines that index Twitter. While this is not a slam dunk as far as search engine optimization benefits go, by phrasing your content in the form of a question, you increase the likelihood that they will be searched for and consumed. Of course, when you tweet based on questions, make sure that there’s a link going back to the source content on your blog or website.

#17: Actively Tweet Using Your Keywords in Non-Hashtag Form

Another way people search Twitter, besides hashtags, is simple keywords. To maximise return on effort, you need to filter all your keyword targets based on whether they are distinctive nouns or not. Once you have figured the distinctive nouns, filter them again based on their niche specificity. If you do this properly, the only people searching for those words are people who have a very pronounced interest in your niche. In other words, you would only attract the eyeballs that would help your brand.

#18: Add @Mentions to Your Content

When people leave you positive feedback, immediately send them an @message. Let them know that you appreciate their feedback and their input is important to you. Similarly, when you publish content, engage influence leaders in your niche by using strategic @mentions. This is also a clever way of republishing content.

You don’t want to republish content over and over again when it’s obvious that you are just cranking out the same info over and over again. By using @mentions, you can spice things up. You’re actually republishing the same narrow range of content, but since the @mentions shift and vary, people can get the impression that you are sending out new material.

@mentions are crucial because you need to get on the radar of people who matter in your niche. These people have a big following. They have a lot of credibility and authority. Wouldn’t it be nice for them to lend your brand some of that authority and credibility by responding to your @mention? Also, if you do this properly and consistently enough, some of these people might even blog about your website. That’s right. You can get backlinks.

The Notifier tool over at Content Marketer from Sujan Patel is perfect for this. OK, it’s not that cheap for a simple tool at $9 per month, but all you have to do is plugin your URL and it’ll handle everything else.

#19: Follow Your Competitor’s Followers

Your competitors tend to attract a lot of followers, and for the most part, most of these followers have low influence levels. You should use influence assessment tools like FollowerWonk to quickly filter the likely influence level of your competitor’s follower list. You’d be surprised as to the gems you’d find. Why should you follow these people and try to engage them? Well, they may be influence leaders in their own right. By getting your brand in front of their eyeballs, you might be able to open the door to strategic partnerships in the future. At the very least, you will be on their radar, and they might engage with your brand through their @mentions.

#20: Embed Credibility Building Tweets on Your Own Blog Posts

As I mentioned in a previous tip, you are constantly sending out tweets from third party websites to let people know that you know what you’re talking about. You are trying to build credibility. Now, don’t let this go to waste by simply restricting them to your Twitter feed. Embed your best and most relevant tweets on appropriate blog posts. Try to write the post in such a way that it references the embedded tweets.

Accordingly, you create a seamless impression that the content all flows together and draws from the credibility and authority of your embedded tweet. The best part of all of this is when the visitor is impressed enough to click the retweet button on your best tweet. You win twice. Not only do you increase dwell time, you also pave the way to your visitor’s viralizing your content.

#21: Embed Your Website’s Facts on Your Twitter Account

Your website may be getting backlinks or otherwise generating information that your target audience members might be interested in. Maybe you are getting a link from a very important website in your niche. Embed some of this statistical data on your twitter account.

While this, in and of itself, may not be a game changer, it can definitely go a long way in letting Twitter users know that you mean business. It is a great way of letting bystanders, as well as influence leaders, understand that your website is influential to some level in your niche. Again, this may seem like a small piece of data, but in the big scheme of things, it adds an important detail. It can add to the overall trustworthiness of your online brand.

#22: Create Tweet Conversations About Your Website and Offerings

Now, you need to be very careful with this tip. Your tweets cannot be so obviously self-serving that you turn off potential visitors. Instead, the conversation should focus on key needs that require solutions in your niche. You’re talking about other people’s problems, not necessarily about your website. This is what will separate purely self-promotional tweets from consequential tweets that aim to solve an issue and incidentally mention your site. I don’t expect you to do this really well the first time around, but the more you practice it, the better you’ll get at it. Gauge your success based on the retweets and likes your conversations get.

#23: Upload High-Quality Niche Specific Photos

If your website is focused on a certain niche, prove it by making sure the pictures that accompany your niche specific content are also niche specific. Remember, the overall impression you’re trying to create is that your website is the “go to site” for a specific type of information. Everything you do on Twitter must lead towards that impression.

But don’t stop there, use a tool like Pablo from Buffer which allows you to add text/quotes to your images making them even more shareable.

#24: Actively Retweet Niche Specific Topics

On your Twitter feed, you can publish many different types of content. You can publish content just directly from your blog, you can retweet other people’s stuff, you can retweet content from other sources. There are just so many things you can do. You can even post infographics. However, when it comes to active promotions, it’s a good idea to stay on message.

I know this is often very difficult, but you need to do it. You need to, again, create a pure stream of information that relates only to a specific category of niche information. If you’re able to stay disciplined, this increases the likelihood that your Twitter feed will be viewed as authoritative. Why is this a big deal? Well, however few that the clicks you get would be more targeted in terms of interest and as a result your blog would only attract targeted traffic.

Let’s face it, if you’re looking to make money online, all the traffic in the world isn’t necessarily going to help you. You need targeted traffic. At the end of the day, online success can only be measured in the form of conversions. Either the visitors put dollars in your pocket, or they don’t. It’s all about conversions. Don’t get hung up on traffic volume. Focus more on traffic quality.

#25: Turn Trolls into Traffic

Now, how often do you get excited about people talking rubbish about your brand? Never?. Most bloggers tend to shy away from negative talk and criticism about their brand on Twitter. In many cases, a lot of online publishers dismiss such conversations as trolling.

Well, you can actually turn those conversations around. By actively policing Twitter for negative chatter about your brand, you can then insert your side of the story. Now, don’t expect people to necessarily believe it. However, by stepping out and airing your side of the story, you gain an opportunity to redirect the narrative. You have to remember that the last thing you want to see happen is to have other people determine your brand for you. You should focus on actively shaping your brand’s identity.

One way to do this is to be proactive regarding trolling incidents and criticisms and simply call them out on it. Present your side. If you do this often and consistently enough, you would be able to transform some of that negative chatter into either neutral chatter or even positive chatter. Always look for opportunities to make your brand shine. Haters will always be there. Trolls will always be around. Instead of fearing them, try to view their work as potential opportunities.

You might not be a national or international brand, but you can certainly learn from some of the bold ways big businesses have dealt with customer complaints which have earned them Twitter kudos:

Keep the 25 tips above in mind when looking to growth hack your website to the next level. While these can go a long way in helping boost overall traffic to your online property, using them simply for traffic would be missing the point. The point here is to use these in conjunction with each other, along with other growth hacking techniques, to build sustainable growth for your online brand.